Most densely packed city in New England, where gentrification is cleverly disguised as "beautifying the city." Where you can forfeit an entire salary on parking tickets alone. Where yuppies hold forum on the dire need for more coffee shops, where an entire arts display under a decrepit bridge was once pillaged overnight, where you can find every ethnicity on the face of the earth, where Davis square has become the mecca of yuppiedom, where Ikea will inevitably lure more traffic than an 18-wheeler jackknife at rush hour, where the most disturbing and bizarre crimes occur, and where Barack Obama once lived.

Yuppie - After having lived in Somerville for a total of 8 months, reading a few Somerville Journal and Wikipedia articles, and having a firmly vague grasp on the history of 'my' city, I shall make a hip definition to liberate the once somerville-barren urban dictionary.

Somerville, MA, is a geographically small (but most densely-populated space in New England) area bordering Cambridge, MA, five minutes from downtown Boston. During the 1950s, it became a student refuge from Cambridge real estate prices (Somerville is a minutes walk to Harvard) and a haven for immigrants and blue collar workers. Within the last twenty years, Somerville housing has skyrocketed and is now seen as one of the hippest and most cosmopolitan places to live in the Boston area, as excellent bars, nightclubs, and restaurants proliferate the areas around Porter, Davis, Union, and Inman squares. In turn, the higher real estate prices have dislocated former renters near the major squares, forcing them farther from downtown Boston. The city also has a proportionally high population of Brazilian and Portuguese immigrants.

City that's only about 10 minutes from Boston. Depending on the time of year, a little warmer/colder than Boston. An ethnically diverse city with people from every continent (but Antarctica). Haven to university students (close proximity to Lesley, Tufts, Harvard, etc.) and immigrants to escape high rent costs found in the neighboring cities of Cambridge, Arlington and Boston. Not a big city, however; 15th most densely-populated inc. place in America (greater pop. density than San Francisco).

Man 1: Hey, buddy, so I just learned where the first American flag was raised on January 1, 1776.
Man 2: Really? That's cool, where?
Man 1: On Prospect Hill, in Somerville, Massachusetts.